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Any time we hear that Lord Worm is back it’s like the return of the coolest substitute teacher at your school; the shop class alternate who lets the kids have at it with the broken bandsaw. Worm is a legendary death metal vocalist, a Hall Of Fame inductee with Cryptopsy and one of the most…

Hearing about Exhumed’s Matt Harvey joining forces with ex-Malevolent Creation drummer Gus Rio, Possessed guitarist Daniel Gonzalez and Derketa bassist Robin Mazen to form Gruesome, a band designed to be “basically a Death tribute band – as the County Medical Examiners are to Carcass, this pretty much is to Death” got me pretty excited. I…

Earlier this spring I interviewed Rune Grønn of Turbonegro, and one nugget he shared was that the biggest reason why the Norwegian band embraced gay imagery in the 1990s was because they knew it was the one thing that would scare away their peers in the Oslo black metal underground. No musical genre is untouchable,…

Scion A/V have tossed lots of free singles, EP’s, splits, compilations, and socks to the ravening metal hordes, but it’s rare that a band releases an entire album through that imprint. Los Angeles-based heavy rock trio Moab are doing just that. Their latest nine-song opus of fuzz and feedback, Billow, will be released later this…

Decibel has been excited for Black Anvil’s third album Hail Death since last year, when we gave readers a sneak peek of studio happenings in a print story. We’ve since teamed with the band to offer the first view of the documentary Making Hail Death. You can order Hail Death now from Relapse. Jason Shevchuk.

The metal institution known as Grave Digger has been around almost as long as the genre of heavy metal. They will release their seventeenth album (yes, that’s correct) called Return Of The Reaper on July 11. Your friends at Decibel got a chance to premiere the lyric video of the track “Season Of The Witch.”…

Montreal’s kings of noise rock diversity and awesome promo photos, The Great Sabatini (who we have mentioned on this blog previously), have a new album in the starting gate. It’s called Dog Years and you can listen to the whole damn thing below while you read guitarist/vocalist Sean Sabatini discuss the record’s nuts ‘n’ bolts…

Calgary’s Throne of Vengeance was one of the bands mentioned in a recent edition of our “Throw Me a Frickin’ Bone,” the magazine’s space for demos and self-releases as curated and delivered by some half-black Canadian nerd face.

Trans Am have been around since the 90s, and in that time they’ve explored everything from post-rock to electronica and Krautrock. They’ve always had hard rock influences, but never more obviously than on their latest release, Volume X. As soon as we heard the stoner rock and thrash vibes of a few of the songs,…

We used to love Akimbo around these parts. I say used to, not because they suddenly betrayed their clangy, mathy roots for a combination of slick radio rock and Drake covers, but because they up and broke up. So, I guess in a roundabout way, we still love Akimbo even though the band doesn’t really…

As we  mentioned in a recent interview with Norwegian filmmaker Christian Falch,  there’s an awfully interesting new documentary in production that more than a few of you might appreciate. ‘Blackhearts’ is slated for a September 2015 release, and follows three black metal fans & musicians from very dissimilar backgrounds as they chase their dreams and…

Do you like slow motion? How about fire? Then boy, do we have a video for you. The video for the title track of the latest album from up-and-coming deathcore act Carnifex features more slow-mo and flames than a Michael Bay movie, plus sweet riffs and knuckle-cracking breakdowns on the musical side. You might not…

Last month at the 2014 Inferno Music Conference (which runs concurrently to the much louder Inferno Metal Festival), I was lucky enough to squeeze into a short presentation led by filmmaker Christian Falch. He was there to introduce his latest project, and from the looks of things, it’ll be a doozy. ‘Blackhearts’ follows three black…

Who would’ve thought that, 24 years after it was first released, Sacred Reich’s classic thrash tune about the dissolution of the American dream would still be just as (if not even more) relevant? Cynical people, certainly, and also Canadian death metal evergreens Kataklysm. They included a cover of said song on the special edition of last…

I’m not exactly sure where Jason Netherton finds the time and energy to do everything he does, but he does. Most of you are probably familiar with him via Misery Index, a band he formed after his departure from Dying Fetus. However, it doesn’t stop there. Presently, he’s kinda-sorta uprooted from his Maryland home and…

Or is it “Tracks Premiere”? Anyway, the openly Canadian label Handshake Inc. is releasing this six-track 7″ grindstravaganza in North America on May 20th (with the impeccable, taste-for-days 7Degrees Records handling duties in every other geographic region), and both bands are wielding two songs a piece while each taking a crack at a His Hero…

Tweak Bird aren’t really metal, so let’s get that out of the way right now (although they ARE more metal than last week’s track). Still, it’s hard to imagine that readers of this site aren’t into The Flaming Lips, Meat Puppets, or Melvins, if not all of them. Besides, Failure is in the Hall Of…

While the moniker may conjure up images of retirees bashing each other over the head with hoes, slashing at their wrinkly skin with hand rakes, Freddy Kruger-ed up gardening gloves and lots of screaming while being chased by gnarly pairs of razor-sharp hedge clippers, Psychotic Gardening is actually a band. You may have made that…

It might seem like Cradle Of Filth has been around forever because, well, they have. But even the black metal superstars had their formative period. One of the documents of that time was Total Fucking Darkness, COF’s third demo. Decibel got the first sneak peak of this old but new material, the track “The Raping…

Rituals are a dime a dozen. Any greasy-haired jabroni with a couple half-baked tremolo riffs and a motheaten cloak can stage a ritual; extra points if he cops a wood-burning kit for Christmas and goes to town on some dirt from outside his grandma’s prayer meeting to accent the seven copies of his upteenth Garageband…

Aurvandil play sick folk-influenced black metal. You can listen to our debut of their second screed to the darkness below, and in the meantime, here’s the man himself to explain what’s going on. What’s your writing process like? There are a lot of intricate layers going on in the music and that must be complicated…

This bit of news may be a week or two old, but considering the connection to the Decibel family and that this album is one of the unsung, unheralded, un-everything albums of the 2000’s that you probably don’t own but should, we felt it merited some more mention. Here are a few informational snippets from…

As fun as it is to cover everything Carcass and At the Gates are up to, occasionally it’s nice to shine a light on a truly underground band. Dallas’s Bludded Head definitely fall into that category, scooping out unpleasant sludge with a tendency towards the minimalist. Their misery comes from a real place, too – singer/guitarist…

Tusmörke came out of nowhere (well, Norway) two years ago with a supernaturally good debut album, one that paid homage to Krautrock groups like Amon Düül II and English psych folk like Jethro Tull while investing their retroactivity with an infectious verve. Not metal in the least, obviously, but where else can you find listeners…

Blistered is a five-piece metallic hardcore outfit who call Tampa home and came to my attention courtesy the good folks at 6131 Records who are releasing their latest offering, and EP called Soul Erosion, which you can stream below. As winter goes on and my stir-craziness hits epic proportions, part of my decision to give…

Satyrs are super horny (literally!) goat people. Satyress is the female version of that. Do not do a Google image search of the term unless you want to feel dirty. But if you want some awesome occult doom with an intense vocalist, Satyress the band are your thing. Their debut, Dark Fortunes, contains so many…

This is not an April Fool’s joke, except on the politically correct thought police: We have the first new Meatmen track in two decades! When I was a kid I sat in my room and cranked The Meatmen at ridiculous volumes and memorized Tesco Vee’s banter on the classic Meatmen platters. So to say this…

Raw Power have long been one of the most underappreciated bands of the early crossover movement (I even did a Lazarus Pit on them a few years back). Still going after 30 years of punk fury, their 10th full-length, Tired and Furious, is about to kick everyone’s ass. We have the first track for you,…

Danny Lilker is a goddamn legend in the metal scene. His long history includes stints in bands as diverse and influential as Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, Storm Troopers of Death, and Brutal Truth. Now on the verge of his 50th birthday, he’s announced his retirement from the touring life, and what better to celebrate his accomplishments…

Old death metal dudes never go away for good. They just do one (or all) of the following: reform; work on a reissue of their out-of-print material; write new songs or join a new Six Feet Under or Malevolent Creation lineup. For Portland death metal OG’s Dead Conspiracy it’s three out of four. They’ll reissue…